Release Week Blitz & Giveaway: ARROGANT BASTARD by Zara Cox

Sep 11, 2017

I'm known as the Black Widow because the desires I hide inside are pure poison.

I was a different person once. Faith, a young wife, hoping to become a mother. My life was pleasant. Stable. It was hell. Until Killian Knight opened my eyes to a world of espionage and intrigue. He saw something in me, something I was too afraid to acknowledge. I didn't want to be excited by the danger. Didn't want to crave the wicked passion only he could provide. But I did want, so now I run. And I pay.

I never meant to corrupt her, but I'm not sorry.

After all, I'm already damned.

After four years of searching and longing, I've finally found her. Faith, the one person in the world I breathe for. She lives beneath my skin as surely as I wear proof of our transgressions inked on my body. And like the forbidden fruit that doomed us from the beginning, our end is inevitable. We lived with no regret. We loved without inhibition. We betrayed those closest to us. We killed for that love. Now...we will burn in hell together.

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I stare at the screen, my blood pumping relief and
shock and fury and joy through my veins. The cocktail of emotions paralyzes me
for several minutes.

Then I force myself to analyze what I’m seeing.

Her hair is different. Longer. Darker.
Pin-straight and rigid where soft, friendly waves used to be. The curve of her
jaw captured by the camera lens also shows the difference. She’s leaner.
Meaner. Even from this obscure angle, I can tell any trace of gentleness has
been wiped clean. Eroded by sin and tragedy and horror. The change was probably
inevitable, but I still don’t want to see the evidence.

To anyone else, the picture would seem
ridiculously vague, the image nothing more than a blurred black-and-white
pixelation of hair, chin, and shoulder.

It’s the reason my algorithm spat it out almost
reluctantly, a last batch of possibilities in the dregs of to-be-discarded
possibilities, and then dumped it in my supercomputer’s equivalent of a spam
folder, the code scrolling impatiently as it waited my command to delete,
delete, delete.

But I know it’s her. Despite the dark leather cap
pulled low over her forehead. Despite the bulky jacket designed to hide her true
shape. Her stealth speaks volumes. Besides, she’s in my blood, in my heartbeat.
After so many years of dead ends and fruitless hoping, of agonizing
disappointment and withering despair, this time I simply…know.

It’s her. The Widow.

My hand shakes as I hit the zoom-in key.
My gut churns, and I feel a little sick as my ever-helpful brain cheerfully
supplies me with all the ways she could’ve continued to elude me—if I’d turned
away, for a second, to stare at one of the other three screens on my desk. If I’d
trusted my supersmart computer and accepted the prompt to delete without
reviewing this particular needle in my mountain of haystacks. If I hadn’t
tweaked the code yet again last night to capture just such an obscure image.

Hell, if I’d blinked at the wrong time…I torture
myself with infinite possibilities as I stare at that mesmerizing angle of chin
and shoulder.

A chin I’ve trailed my treacherous fingers over
many times in helpless wonder.

A shoulder I’ve rested my guilty but secretly
unrepentant head on.

There’s so much more to her. And I treasured every
single inch of her forbidden body, fucked her at every opportunity she granted
me. Until she systematically erased herself from my life.

But why New York? And why now?

I know how good she is. Hell, she’s the best or
she wouldn’t have eluded me for this long. The thought of another four years
without her punches a cold fist through my gut. With it comes the certainty
that I wouldn’t have survived those next four years without her. That I’ve been
clinging on with the very last dregs of my endurance to make it this far.

But here she is…

The Widow.

I can’t see her eyes, but I don’t fool myself into
thinking they’ll hold an ounce of softness. What we did changed us forever. And
not for the better.

I lean back in my chair. Exhale slowly. Terrified
of blinking in case she disappears from my screen. It doesn’t matter that I’ve
copied and stored the longitude and latitude of her location in a dozen vaults
on my server and memorized every single piece of data on the screen.

New York City. East Fifty-Third Street. CCTV
camera. A one-in-a-billion shot.

My lips twitch but a smile doesn’t quite form. My
eyes water with the need to blink. But I resist. “I changed them last week. You
reset them again, didn’t you?”

“I assure you, I’m quite incapable of doing that.”

“Yeah, right. Fine. Place a call for me. Pilot.
Home.”

“Dialing pilot. Home,” the female AI obliges me.

Nelson Whittaker, my LA-based English pilot, picks
up on the second ring. It’s three a.m. but he answers as if it’s normal working
hours. Which it is, to be fair. Everything is normal for me in my line of work.

“Good morning, sir.”

“How soon can you get to the airport?” I snap.

“As soon as I put on my trousers and chuck a
bucket of water over my son to wake him up,” he replies with a dark chuckle.

My fingers fly over the keyboard as I save her
information in a few more electronic vaults. “Give William my apologies,” I
say.

“No need. He’s been champing at the bit to take
the new girl for another spin.” The new girl being the Bombardier Global 8000 I
added to my collection of private jets last month.

“In that case, I expect to see you at Van Nuys
within the hour.” At this time of the morning, traffic from their Santa Monica
apartment should be light enough to get them there fast.

Zara Cox has been writing for almost twenty-five years but it wasn't until nine years ago that she decided to share her love of writing sexy, gritty stories with anyone outside her close family (the over 18s anyway!). This series is Zara's next step in her erotic romance-writing journey, and she would love to hear your thoughts. Visit her:

A creationist! I am an avid reader and book enthusiast who is a strong supporter of authors I believe in.That same passion is taken outside of the blogosphere to share with special groups, libraries, and just about anywhere books are mentioned. I'm also a publishing marketing junkie and an active media consultant, specializing in book promotion, advertising, and other online projects.An information curator that loves to share. Follow me on Twitter!